Two Circuits, Four Podiums, Zero Excuses
On the same late-April 2022 weekend, Lamborghini planted its flag at two Portuguese circuits separated by roughly 300 kilometers and came away leading both championships. At Estoril, Oregon Team’s Leonardo Pulcini and Benja Hites won both International GT Open races in the #63 Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO, while teammates Glenn van Berlo and Kevin Gilardoni brought the #19 car home third in the Pro class each time. At Portimão, Grasser Racing Team‘s Lamborghini Factory Driver Mirko Bortolotti qualified on pole for the DTM’s opening round, then collected a pair of third-place finishes to take the early points lead.
Neither result came from the front row. Neither relied on attrition. Both told the same story: a GT3 platform that first raced years ago continues to embarrass newer machinery from McLaren, Mercedes-AMG, Ferrari, and Audi on results sheets that matter. Lamborghini says this marks the beginning of a campaign for what would be a fifth International GT Open Championship title in seven years, and the ambition looks well-founded. Pulcini and Hites carry a six-point championship advantage into the next round at Paul Ricard, and Bortolotti leads the DTM standings outright. The Huracán GT3 EVO, it turns out, is not merely surviving against current-generation rivals. It is setting the pace.
Estoril: From Fifth on the Grid to Unchallenged
Oregon Team’s GT Open debut could serve as a case study in how Lamborghini’s customer racing pipeline works. The squad won the Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe drivers’ and teams’ championships the previous season with Pulcini and Gilardoni, then stepped up to GT3 competition and immediately looked at home.
In Race 1, the #63 started fifth. Pulcini drove through to third during the opening stint, and after the driver change, Hites closed on the leading McLaren of Nick Moss with a visible pace advantage. The decisive pass came at the entry to the VIP Turn with under nine minutes remaining. Behind them, the #19 car of van Berlo and Gilardoni finished third, giving Oregon Team a 1-3 result on its first GT Open outing.
Race 2 demanded more. Hites started sixth but sliced to fourth with an aggressive move around the outside of the first corner. After the pit stop, Pulcini inherited the car carrying a three-second success penalty, the regulatory tax for winning the day before. He overtook the Audi of Marcin Jedlinski, then dived past the Mercedes of Reema Juffali with six minutes left, and finally seized the lead from the Ferrari of Roman Ziemian. Late pressure from the McLaren of Joe Osborne could not dislodge him. Van Berlo and Gilardoni again secured third in the Pro class.
The pattern across both races is instructive. Lamborghini’s cars won on race pace, driver quality, and strategy execution rather than grid position, which tells you more about the competitiveness of the package than any pole position would. That a team fresh from Super Trofeo could extract this level of performance on its GT3 debut weekend speaks directly to the depth of Squadra Corse‘s customer support structure.
Two victorious drivers celebrate their win with a '1' board and a special message for Jerry next to their pink Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO.
Portimão: Bortolotti Proves the Huracán Belongs in DTM
Grasser Racing Team’s DTM debut at Portimão carried a different kind of pressure. The DTM grid features factory-backed Mercedes-AMG entries and Ferrari customer teams with deep experience in the series, so arriving as a newcomer and immediately qualifying on pole was a statement in itself.
Bortolotti held the lead from the rolling start despite the close attention of Mercedes drivers Mikaël Grenier and Lucas Auer. Lamborghini says the #63 Huracán was the fastest car on track during the opening segment, maintaining the lead through the mandatory pit stop window. A safety car period, triggered when teammate Rolf Ineichen encountered a problem exiting the pits, reshuffled the order. Bortolotti then suffered his own issue at the restart and dropped to fifth. His recovery to third, completed with a pass on the Mercedes of Maro Engel, salvaged a strong result from what could have been a lost race.
Race 2 added ballast to the equation. Bortolotti qualified second but carried an extra 5kg as success ballast from his previous podium. He held second early before falling behind the Ferrari of Felipe Fraga. The pace to challenge the leaders was not quite there after the pit stops, but another third-place finish proved consistent enough to secure the DTM points lead heading to the Lausitzring.
The DTM result matters as much as the GT Open sweep for anyone tracking Lamborghini’s motorsport credibility. The field includes some of the best GT3 drivers in Europe, and leading the championship after the opening round as a debutant team validates both the car and the driver. More importantly, it reinforces the same thesis that Estoril established: the Huracán GT3 EVO remains competitive against newer machinery across different regulations and different grids.
A triumphant race car driver proudly displays his large silver trophy after a successful race event.
Why the Huracán GT3 EVO Keeps Winning Against Newer Rivals
The competitive landscape of GT3 racing in 2022 included updated machinery from Mercedes-AMG, Ferrari, McLaren, and Audi. Several of those platforms were newer in their development cycle than the Huracán GT3 EVO, yet Lamborghini’s car kept appearing at the sharp end of results sheets across multiple series and regulations. The Portugal weekend was not an anomaly; it was a pattern.
Part of the explanation lies in Squadra Corse’s approach to evolution. Rather than designing a clean-sheet replacement on a fixed schedule, Lamborghini refined the Huracán GT3 platform through successive EVO updates that addressed aerodynamics, cooling, and driveability without forcing customer teams to learn an entirely new car. For teams like Oregon and Grasser, that continuity translates into accumulated setup knowledge, driver familiarity, and operational confidence that a brand-new chassis cannot replicate overnight.
The customer racing ecosystem itself compounds that advantage. Oregon Team’s progression from Super Trofeo champions to GT Open race winners in a single off-season illustrates how Lamborghini’s ladder system works in practice. A team that masters the one-make series arrives at GT3 competition already fluent in the Huracán’s behavior, its electronics architecture, and its pit-stop procedures. That institutional knowledge builds over seasons. Most privateer GT3 teams will tell you that the relationship between manufacturer support and on-track results is not linear; it is exponential once a team reaches a certain level of familiarity with the platform.
The Huracán GT3 EVO’s naturally aspirated V10 also offers a specific advantage in driver confidence. Throttle response is immediate and predictable, which matters enormously in the kind of close-quarters, late-braking battles that decided both Estoril races. Turbocharged rivals can match or exceed peak power, but the linearity of the Huracán’s power delivery remains a tangible asset when a driver is threading through traffic with nine minutes left on the clock.
The pink and yellow Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO, number 19, navigates a turn on the race track during a GT Open event.
From Huracán to Temerario: What These Results Mean for Lamborghini’s GT3 Future
Every win the Huracán GT3 EVO accumulates adds both luster and pressure to its eventual successor. According to Car and Driver, the Temerario GT3 is the first race car entirely designed and developed at Lamborghini’s Sant’Agata Bolognese facility, replacing the Huracán GT3 Evo 2 as the brand’s factory-backed GT3 effort. That car will use a modified version of the road car’s twin-turbocharged V8, a fundamental shift from the naturally aspirated V10 that powered every Huracán-based racer.
The transition raises real questions for Lamborghini’s customer teams. For squads like Oregon and Grasser, who built their programs around the Huracán’s characteristics, adapting means learning an entirely new powerband, different weight distribution, and the complexities of turbo management in wheel-to-wheel racing. The success penalty system in GT Open and the ballast regulations in DTM will interact differently with a turbocharged engine’s torque curve. None of these are insurmountable problems, but they underscore why the current results matter: Lamborghini is building championship momentum and team loyalty now, before asking those same teams to make a significant technical leap.
Lamborghini’s broader motorsport picture is also evolving. Jalopnik reported that the SC63 LMDh program was discontinued after two seasons without the results the company hoped for, which concentrates Squadra Corse’s competitive energy more squarely on the GT3 category. For enthusiasts, that focus could prove beneficial. A manufacturer that pours its racing resources into customer GT3 programs tends to deliver better support, faster development cycles, and more competitive cars than one splitting attention across prototype and GT categories simultaneously.
The practical takeaway: the 2022 season opener demonstrated that the Huracán GT3 EVO still wins races outright against current-generation competitors. When the Temerario GT3 eventually arrives on grids, it will inherit a customer base that expects nothing less.
Championship Math and What Comes Next
Pulcini and Hites left Estoril with a six-point GT Open championship lead before the Paul Ricard round. Bortolotti departed Portimão atop the DTM standings after Grasser Racing Team’s first weekend in the series. Both results carried the iconic #63, the number Lamborghini reserves for its most significant racing efforts as a nod to the company’s 1963 founding year.
The GT Open championship format, which features two races per weekend across European circuits, rewards consistency as much as outright speed. Oregon Team’s ability to finish 1-3 in both races, with both cars scoring, is exactly the kind of weekend that builds title campaigns. Few teams in any GT3 series manage that level of reliability and pace simultaneously from two entries on their debut weekend. In the DTM, the challenge is different. Bortolotti’s pole position proved the Huracán’s single-lap pace, but the race results revealed that safety car periods and ballast regulations can erode advantages quickly. Leading the championship after one round is encouraging; sustaining that lead across a full DTM season, against Mercedes-AMG teams with years of series-specific experience, would be a genuine achievement.
Lamborghini did not release full championship standings or detail its long-term DTM strategy beyond the immediate results. What the opening round confirmed is that the brand’s customer racing model, promoting teams through Super Trofeo into GT3 competition while pairing them with factory drivers in parallel series, generates results across multiple championships simultaneously. Whether that translates into title-winning consistency over a full season is the question the rest of 2022 will answer. For now, the Huracán GT3 EVO has made its case with the only argument that matters in racing: results.
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